Keywords: building innovation, community space, graphic simulation, unit insertion building system, aging society.

Distribution and development of apartment housing have helped cope with the ever increasing housing demands in Korea while enhancing the qualities of both the housing and the residents' lives. Apartment housing has however, contributed to community breakdown, which became one of the serious problems in modern society. As urbanization has been accelerated and apartments became the primary residential environment, the sense of community among residents has been on the wane and indifference to local neighbourhoods is expanding. This phenomenon has become a critical social issue; exploring alternatives is now underway in order to enhance the communal sense in relation to apartment environments. In this paper, an innovative intervention to vitalize the social-mix in apartments whose concept has been proposed as a way to solve the pending issues will be outlined, and more specifically diverse research and design methods will be covered.

Although a vicious cycle of poverty became one of the pending social problems, it is difficult to solve this issue. In particular, the process of distributing rental apartments has caused tenants to be victims of social segregation. This is especially true, because a major group of tenants includes elderly people and the handicapped. For this group socially integration planning is required, especially, since the socially excluded population will increase rapidly.

In reality, the shared space in the residential sects in Korea is in poor condition lacking any necessary facilities to cope with high demands of welfare services. In this contact, a building innovation proposal an alternative was suggested to be an efficient strategy to overcome current demographic and ecological crisis. The proposal is expected to help revitalize community through shared space as it can be used to deliver various services for the socially segregated people.

Creating community integrated infrastructure for welfare space will be demanding in the future housing plan and can be effectively dealt with by establishing a specific ratio of mandatory community space for each individual housing complex. The so called unit insertion building system (UIBS) has, a designated community space, which is about 5-10% of the building. It can be facilitated a spare space which can be used as a "green slot" or as an artistic space to enhance an aesthetic view of the building when it is not used for any specific purpose, at the beginning. The community function also can be added later based on need allowing for demographic change. This space could be facilitated directly on the site or be inserted with pre-assembled units produced as a mass production later. The function of this place will be chosen by the residents.

In the re-designed apartments diverse floor designs and simulation images for them and virtual reality models have been developed to help to facilitate communication and consensus among residents that will change the apartments drastically. People from various walks of life surveyed showed an affirmative response toward them. So the revised proposals are expected to cause big changes in housing development. In the process, high-tech utilizing new digital technology played a great role in making people understood easily and has had an immediate favourable response.

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